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Digimon Adventure tri. Part 1 has been both a short (streaming at the same time Japan got it) and a long wait (dub and home release.)

Well, it's here. I have the final home video release for Part 1 in my hands. Everyone has been waiting a long time for this one. This is the first American Digimon release where we get Japanese audio and subtitles on a home release, to say nothing of the fact that we have an English dub with a good chunk of the original cast returning nearly 20 years later.

It's been a little over a year and a half (bordering on two years) since the Japanese release (along with our streaming subtitled release) and nearly 9 months since the one night screening of the dub via Fathom Events. With the retail release a little under 2 weeks away (May 16th), it's time to dig in and see what we have for our disc release of Digimon Adventure tri. Part 1.

Very little scanning and editing on this one, but I went over quite a few different versions of tri. Part 1 for a reasonably level of accuracy.

Since it's been awhile I'll go ahead and go over the content itself rather than just the product info and technical aspects as I normally do.

Digimon Adventure tri. Part 1 - Reunion is a return to what began Digimon as a multimedia franchise and not just an LCD based toy on a keychain. Since Digimon Adventure and it's sequel Zero-Two went off the air Digimon has tried many new things, and also tried many times to recreate that 'spark' that was Adventure. Much like with other franchises, everyone has their opinion of the best part, but in the end... it will always come back to Adventure. As that has become more and more obvious over time, a handful of Digimon fans have even referred to Adventure fans as 'G1-ers' or some variation, similar to the Transformers fans who always goes back to the original G1 series whenever anything else shows up. And it isn't completely wrong.

tri. is both a return to form and something new. The familiar is elements like the characters. Some have been boiled down to their pure essence (Mimi and Koushiro), while characters like Taichi are reflected through the lens of being older to show how we all become new people as we mature. The difference is the general mood and pace. Instead of 20 some odd minutes of a general problem and a battle or two, we have a feature length animation that based on how you want to view it could be either a film or more akin to an OVA (I've generally sidestepped that argument by using the Bandai/Sunrise term 'Premium Animation'.)

tri. uses these familiar characters to tell a story that, at least in Part 1, is very laid back. It is very dedicated to spending it's roughly hour and a half runtime to reacquaint us with the characters. Your opinion on that may differ based on what you want from it. My view now is almost identical to what it was when I first saw part 1 when it first streamed. tri. is comfort food. It's sitting back and relaxing with friends. It's fun. And honestly, not everyone will like that. I think a lot of people were expecting Digimon to be more violent and edgy with tri. being aimed at fans who grew up, but I'm glad it isn't. It's easy to do violent and edgy, especially poorly (look at any number of the forgotten anime OVAs from the 90s.) I don't take that on it's own as being mature. Mature is being thoughtful, having intent. I love that Digimon has that right now. And I love that it still feels like Digimon while doing so.

The plot in Part 1 is reasonably thin, but not in a bad way, because it's mostly setup and character moments (which isn't a bad idea for a new story after so many years.) The kids from Zero-Two do make an appearance, but based on how accepting you are of a quick visual and names on a computer screen later, you might not be happy if you walked in expecting a lot of Zero-Two content.

The actual plot itself I'll let you discover on your own (or in the case for anyone who has watched it before, rediscover), but I really like tri. I ended up walking away with something I really enjoyed, even after nearly two years of being able to reflect on it.

The English dub itself has been of great interest to people. As most everyone is aware, the majority of the cast has returned, with a few newcomers (and an oldie in a new role.) Returning characters are to a large degree, the voices you remember from nearly 20 years ago. More than a few of them, either due to acting choices, age, or some combination, have slightly different voices for their characters. These all work quite well. The ones that have small changes come across as the characters having grown and fit well for everyone (and in many cases are such subtle changes that people online disagree if there are even are changes.)

All of these voices will delight fans, with a handful being so identical you could swear they were plucked out of time to play their characters again.

A handful of roles have new actors also. These by and large are new interpretations of the characters, with only one coming to mind as being strictly similar to the old voice. The new interpretations all work rather well. The only issue is them not sounding like the old ones.

I admit Gatomon and Biyomon just don't sound right to me. They don't sound bad, they just... aren't the ones I knew (although one or two of Gatomon's lines while writing all of this up shocked me with how close they sounded.)

Joe, Matt, and TK fit the idea of 'growing up' so them having different voices comes across as rather natural. Your view on them will likely be based on if you like the particular voices they have now. Two of them are well known VAs who have been in anime dubs for many years, and chances are your opinion of them and their prior work will inform your opinion.

The handful of new characters in Part 1 work quite well even though, in general, their parts are rather small. Most notably to fans is Doug Erholtz as Daigo, when he previously voiced TK in Zero-Two (based on comments from a few people it appears he simply grew out of being able to do his TK voice.)

The English dub itself has script changes, like the original dub, but these are generally much milder than the original Adventure and Zero-Two dub (or even the recent dub of Xros Wars as Fusion.) This is more akin to the "Revenge of Diaboromon" movie dub than the original two seasons or Digimon the Movie. The dialogue has, at times, been sweetened for the occasional extra joke (or tweaking of a joke), but the experience isn't wildly dissimilar from the Japanese in this case. Fans will be pleased to know the adaption writers have done their homework and slipped in a bit of dialogue or two that will be familiar to fans of the original shows' dub.

I'm guessing the only thing most people won't like is the new theme. The new theme is meant to be evocative (yet legally distinct) from the original English themesong, and to a degree it succeeds. There are honestly times when it comes very close to it's goal. The issue is other times it just doesn't sound right. Without having the original theme (or the Frontier dub theme as later dubbed movies used) I think most would have likely just preferred Butter-Fly be kept.

It's a great dub and I believe by and large it did what it set out to do. Fans are going to be very happy with it.

A few small additional notes...
The opening credits have been swapped out from the original Japanese for equivalent credits in English. This was done to the original (pre-credit) footage and matches the style of the opening credits in the Japanese release.

In addition, the ending credits are shorter than the version on the Japanese disk. The actual ED footage in a window box is the same as on the Japanese version, but the credits have been shortened and a shorter version of the ED theme 'I Wish' is used so that all 3 elements end at roughly the same time.

Also, no visual edits or tweaks have been made to the film itself, so we still get the 'green' evolution rings instead of the later finished spinning gold rings (and if you look at TKs computer, the misspelling of Digidestined is still there.)

And for those interested, the logo used in film is the Japanese logo, and

And as I mentioned before, this is also (notably) the first time in the USA that we can buy a disc and hear the Japanese voices.

Onto the product itself!

Any screencaps from the Blu-ray, DVD, or digital copies are lossless PNGs.

Most images in the article are smaller copies from our gallery (to keep loading sizes smaller for everyone), but link to the full sized versions when clicked.

Scanning was done as high quality as I could do, and compressed and shrunk to reasonable sizes, along with reasonable quality JPG compression. I've explained my workflow in my personal thread and will answer any questions involving it or the processes used.

First up will be the physical stuff.

The front cover (at the top of the article) uses the well known theatrical poster art for tri. Part 1. The logo is the English version of the tri. logo with blue backing so that the text is easier to read. They've also added a small 'slide' to the left of the bottom part of the logo in orange with the title of Part 1, Reunion. The top has an orange colored bar listing Blu-ray and DVD. This being probably the best known part of artwork specific to Part 1, it makes sense to use, especially since it's such a fun and dynamic piece of art.

The logo placement probably could have been better to cover less of the artwork, but it being front and center certainly isn't a bad thing.

The back cover has a quote from Agumon, along with the standard tri. plot description we've seen for a long time. Thankfully, this being a dub-centric release, they make sure that the proper dub names and terms are used (most of the time we've seen this used it's been various combinations of English and Japanese terms.)

Underneath that we get a list of extras (along with a mention of the Japanese audio.) We also get a few cropped screenshots, along with a full list of product specs and info at the bottom.

The UPC code was partially clipped out, so I've removed the rest of it.

Because I could scan it flat since the entire thing was an insert, we also have the spine of the insert. This uses the English 'line' tri. logo version nicely, combining the blue and orange motif the packaging goes with in a way that looks quite clean.

The Blu-ray comes with a slipcover (in an o-card shape) that is made out a nice cardstock. The slipcover front, back, and side are all reasonably the same as the main insert. The main changes are the mention of the digital copy on the front and back. I assume once the digital copy is no longer offered, Shout will simply will stop including the slipcover, and they won't have to revise the packaging any further.

The front has a sticker on it mentioning tri. Part 1 being new, it having both audio tracks, the English cast returning, along with a mention of the special feature interviews.

The back has a square cut out of it so the UPC is visible through the slipcover.

There was no way for me to get the slipcover flat to get either of the spines, but they are both identical to the insert spine (I tried to get them anyways, but they always came out curvy and weird.)

The Blu-ray case itself is a relatively standard Blu-ray case, which means that it isn't just colored blue, it's also see thru.

Rather than leave the other side blank, they've included a nice shot of Tai (I believe from the under the bridge scene) with various credits printed on it. Not super common to do this, but it lends some extra class to the release in a neat and unexpected way.

The bit clipped out from the UPC code, of course, also removed a chunk of this (it being the other side and all.) I went ahead and repaired it for the gallery image.

The physical Blu-ray and DVD continue the heavy use of blue.

They look nice with just a simple picture of Agumon to add a bit of color and flavor past the blue and orange. My Blu-ray copy appeared to have the disc label be misprinted, which is why Agumon is quite blurry on that image.

No physical extras, except the digital copy slip.

Despite being used, I went ahead and removed the code, just in case. It's a basic redemption information sheet, that gives you instructions that are very clear.

And that's it for the physical... onto the disc contents itself!

The video is encoded using AVC at an average bitrate of roughly 32 Mbps. Good bitrate for animated content. tri. part 1 is encoded at 1080p and 24 frames per second. Notably this is a larger bitrate for tri. than ANY of the currently available Japanese discs. In Japan tri. part 1 was roughly 26 Mbps.

tri. on Blu-ray looks great. Frankly, I could probably just paste in my original comments on the Japanese video and it'd fit, so that's mostly what I did (although I've tweaked things a little bit I'll admit.)

The video quality itself is roughly what we expected. Everything is digital animation, so it looks great. You occasionally get a background or some other detail that isn't aliased that well, but that's par for the course for animated content. One thing to note is dark scenes look quite good. On occasion you will see some very mild banding but it doesn't seem to be to much of an issue.

There are slightly off frames if you pick and choose, and the occasional stilted bit of animation, which is normal in animation when you pick and choose what to show, but the encode on the Blu-ray itself is relatively pristine.

The English audio is a 5.1 lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track. Good lossless 24-bit audio.
The Japanese audio is a 2.0 lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track, also 24-bit. The audio on the Japanese disc was 5.1 and 16-bit.

The audio quality overall is, to my memory, roughly equivalent to what the Japanese release had. The only downgrade would be if you have a nice 5.1 setup and wanted to listen to the Japanese audio.

My computer subwoofer got a few nice kicks from the audio, and the audio mixes are rather nice.

The lack of 5.1 Japanese audio is a shame, and unfortunately we may never know why it wasn't included. Luckily tri. never really used directional audio so while a shame that it wasn't included, it isn't a major issue. My guess is that if you have a 5.1 and turn on Dolby ProLogic or other setups that convert 2.0 to 5.1, you probably won't even notice a difference.

And since someone will no doubt ask, yes, the Japanese audio uses Butter-Fly.

The DVD included here should be the same as the standalone DVD release, and has roughly what you'd expect for the disc.

Video is encoded using MPEG-2 at an average bitrate of 8.5Mbps. This is quite a bit higher than we often see for anime content on a DVD, and is nearing the tip top of what a DVD can do. It's encoded at 480p and properly shows as ' 24fps film' content.

The DVD certainly doesn't look as good as a Blu-ray, but I can't imagine tri. could look reasonably better than this DVD does.

The audio is roughly equivalent also. The English track is a 5.1 Dolby track at 448k, while the Japanese is 2.0 Dolby at 192k. Relatively standard and expected.

It feels like the audio on the DVD is missing a bit of punch compared to the Blu-ray, but there isn't much surprise there. It's roughly the same as listening to an MP3 versus a FLAC or WAV. Some people will notice, others wont, and even the DVD is pretty good.

3 subtitle tracks are included on both Blu-ray and DVD:
Closed Captioning for the English dub
Sign track for the English dub
English subtitles for the Japanese audio

Closed captioning is something that has tapered off in anime related releases a number of years ago, but has come up quite a bit in recent memory. It's nice to see it included, more so that it is a proper closed captioning track. If a characters mouth isn't visible, you see their name. If a phone vibrates offscreen, they caption that a phone has vibrated, etc. I don't use captioning tracks myself, but it's a good thing to have a proper track for those who need it (or want to watch it with friends/family who may need it.)

The sign track is exactly 12 lines, most of which aren't strictly necessary since there is (to my recollection) always dialogue in the dub explaining or commenting on those moments. Nice to have though.

The subs for the Japanese track are... basically the same subtitles we had at Crunchyroll and other streaming services. The subtitles are perfectly fine, but could have really used an extra QC pass or two. A handful of random spelling and grammar issues pop-up, along with Toei's habit of being unsure if they want to use Japanese or English terms for things. When characters evolve, they use evolution. Honorifics are used. But then they go out of their way to use Digidestined instead of Chosen Child and Biyomon and Gatomon instead of Piyomon and Tailmon, or anytime Hikari calls Taichi "onii-chan" they just have it say Taichi instead of leaving it as is or changing it to something that works like 'big brother.'

I can't judge the subtitles on the actual quality of the translation since I don't speak Japanese, but they seem good, and there haven't been major complaints in the over year and a half since they first showed up online. It's just too bad that Toei hasn't polished them a bit. It feels like the subs are 85 to 90% to the point where they'd be amazing, and that last few percentage points wouldn't be that hard.

A few small revisions were made though..
The original subs used Jo and Koushiro. They have been updated on the discs (also updated on streaming platforms) to Joe and Koshiro. Nothing really wrong with these changes (I tend to prefer Jou and Koushiro myself.)
The only other change I noticed was there didn't seem to be any 'markers' onscreen for when Koushiro swaps to French for a few lines, instead they italicize the text. This isn't inherently a negative change, but italicized text is also used for whoever is offscreen in a phone call, and Koushiro is having a phone conversation inter-spliced with him speaking French.

And a few additional subtitle notes:
Brave Heart isn't subtitled on any of the tracks, although MAN: [Singing in Japanese] may be my favorite line from a caption track ever.
Butter-Fly and I Wish are both subtitled on the subs for the Japanese track.
I Wish isn't subtitled on the caption track, it gets [Singing in Japanese]
The sign track for the dub, as mentioned above, only has 12 lines, so the songs aren't subtitled on that.

Good subs in general, I just wish they were even better.

Update- Added this subtitle comparison based on a question I received.
Blu-ray subs are image 1, DVD subs are 2, Blu-ray Captions are 3

The fonts used for the subtitles are nice (and all appear to be variants of Arial I believe?) Interestingly enough, the font used for the Japanese language subs is different than the font the caption and sign tracks use on the Blu-ray.

I admit I tend to like my subtitles a bit bigger, so I wish the Blu-ray subtitles were a bit larger. Scaled to the same size you can see the DVD subtitles look significantly larger.

The Blu-ray menu is rather nice. It has the dub theme playing, along with random clips from Part 1. The clips all have various mock 'digital corruption/noise' filters on them to some degree to add a bit of flavor to them. I think it works well, but I admit when originally going over the disc I thought something was wrong. The actual menu items are clean and easy to read, with a yellow highlight and arrow appearing on the item you are on. The menu was fighting me on getting captures, so I was only able to get the main menu. The various sub menus appear in small pop ups right above the main menu bar.

The DVD menu does it's best to emulate the setup of the Blu-ray menu, and does it reasonably well. Each submenu has it's own menu page on the DVD using a very nice digital 'wave' motif (which is actually screencaps from the opening minutes of tri. Part 1.)

I actually suspect that the main menu itself is the exact same video feed as the Blu-ray (since the main menu portion appears burned into the video in both), simply downscaled. This would explain the one negative of the DVD menu, which is that that logo (and especially the 'Reunion' bumper added to the logo) are very small, with Reunion being nearly unreadable.

Time for extras!

For those who have imported tri. from Japan, you've gotten used to a lot of promotional trailers and videos, along with clean OPs and EDs as appropriate. No clean OPs or EDs here.... but we have ACTUAL extras.

First up we have 2 minutes and 13 seconds of footage of the premiere event for tri. part 1 at the TCL Chinese 6 Theater. We get a bit of footage from inside the theater along with footage from the premiere party that happened right after, which was thrown by Funimation for Toei. This is a short and relatively basic extra, but it's nice to get a look at it for all of us who couldn't make it there.

The only other extra is relatively substantial if I'm being honest.

22 minutes and 18 seconds of interviews with a handful of the dub cast and director. These are EPK style interviews, where people were interviewed one on one and they go between people. Rather than answering interview questions, they explain elements of tri., their characters, their thoughts, etc. I'm not going to list who was/wasn't interviewed for it, but there is a decent range of people. Especially interesting to many people will likely be director Ryan Johnston, if only because it's exceedingly rare for Digimon in the USA to have anyone new step into the director's chair for anime. In addition, the interview also has clips of more Digimon Adventure tri. being dubbed, which I have no doubt all of us will mine for as much information as possible prior to any further announcements (although I can safely say some of the actors, if not all, have finished recording thru part 3.)

Not really an extra, but seems like a good place to mention it again... the digital copy!

When you buy the Blu-ray, you get a voucher code for a digital copy of Part 1. This is a DRM-Free downloading & streaming code that redeems via VHX. This is effectively the Cadillac of digital copies.

You receive a copy that you can stream on your devices using the various VHX apps, to say nothing of the DRM-Free download itself.

The download copy itself is made up of half a dozen different MP4 files of varying specifications, which you can choose and download at will. And because they are DRM-Free, you can make use of it the best way for you (as an example, I've thrown the highest quality copy on my media server.) It's worth mentioning most of the VHX streaming apps also allow you to download specific versions to your devices, but may not include the full range of resolutions that the web interface does.

And because I can... I went through them all for their specifications and took screencaps also.

The streaming copy by default chooses the version that will best stream with your connection, although on some platforms you can force it to a specific copy.

You haven't lived until you've watched a 144p video encode. Makes me feel like I'm young and just got DSL again... and updated RealPlayer.

The digital copy is English dub only (potentially a licensing issue with tri. streaming subtitled in quite a few places?) They additionally provide a downloadable SRT subtitle file of the closed captioning (which is also toggleable while watching it streaming.)

Someone must agree with me about the sign track being superfluous, because it isn't included as an SRT. But like I said, DRM-Free! So I made my own with the 12 lines.

I'm not going to judge the video and audio here, but most of them are relatively standard digital encodes. For comparisons sake though, the 4 episodes that make up the episodic cut of tri. Part 1 on Crunchyroll are roughly the same size as the 1080p download.

You may wonder why you'd want a 144p copy of tri., but who knows. If you have a phone without much memory, a movie that takes up under 150MB might be a great idea on the off chance you end up somewhere without a connection.

I'm unsure if the encodes online right now are the final versions, as the filesizes are different than listed on the redemption sheet (and don't match the filesizes listed on the digital to own versions either.)

Although I do hope they add a sign SRT track in all seriousness, even though I've made my own.

Digimon Adventure tri. Part 1 has received a very good release in the USA on Blu-ray. The video is quite good and the dub audio is great. The Japanese audio is a smidge of a downgrade from the Japanese release, and I wish Toei would put a bit more care into their subtitles, but overall this is a nice package. I especially appreciate having 'actual' extras, even if many people might consider them a bit closer to fluff.

Pretty much all of that applies to the DVD also, which of course has it's own standalone release.

I'm looking forward to having more tri. on my shelf.

The VHX DRM-Free digital copy is icing on the cake for those buying the Blu-ray.

The list of actual things I'd like to be improved on future releases is quite small, and even thinking about it carefully I could only come up with 4 things. And staring at the list makes me wonder if all of these aren't licensing impossibilities and at least two of these are me nitpicking if I'm being honest... but I can certainly hope:
5.1 Japanese Audio
Improved Japanese audio subtitle track
Extras are good... more extras, the OPs/EDs would be a nice addition. And I doubt it's possible, but I think we'd all like the audio drama Toei recorded at DigiFes 2016. Perhaps take the production art used in booklets from the Japanese release and have a digital gallery on the disks for it.
Since I'm guessing future releases will use the theatrical posters, I'd like for the home video covers from the Japanese release to be used somewhere. The art is so gorgeous it'd be a shame to not have them included somewhere.

The digital to own versions of Digimon Adventure tri. Part 1 should be reasonably similar to the digital copy: dub only with closed captioning. Various storefronts are listing it as $10 for the SD only version and $13 for the HD. In addition, if you buy the HD from iTunes, the extras will be included (along with a full menu.)

Screencaps were taken largely at random while jumping around the various versions included with the Blu-ray (although if I knew a moment was coming up I wanted a cap of, I'd wait.) Owing to the unique way DVDs are encoded, the DVD screencaps have been stretched legnthwise to the proper aspect ratio, as they would appear while actual watching. The Blu-ray and digital screencaps are all straight off the disk or direct from the download.

The scans are very small compared to the master scans I did (the work and backup folder structure for the scans and screencaps is over 15 gigs.) I will try and make wallpapers if people are interested. If you want to see a specific screencap of something give me a rough timecode if you can.

At the moment Shout only has Digimon Adventure tri. Parts 1 thru 3, and sales of this will certainly directly affect if Shout decides to nab the rest of it, so if you like tri. and want to support it, nab a copy (in fact, if you are near a store on the day of release, nab a copy from a store, if brick and mortar stores have interest in having more Digimon on their shelves, it's the easiest way to get more.)

Digimon Adventure tri. Part 1 was reviewed using a screener that came in the standard retail packaging (with part of the UPC code clipped out.) I still have my pre-order active and plan to keep it (the screener has that cutout on the UPC code I mentioned earlier, and I want to have one that is all pristine.

Thanks to everyone who has donated for us to do various scans and breakdowns in the past. We are still taking donations so we can do similar for future releases. If you are willing to donate please take a look at the most recent thread on the subject.

Ahh man, the wait for Reunion has taken so long that it's bordering on insanity. I'm glad it looks like the release will be worth it though, and in theory we should be getting the next couple of parts in a more timely manner. A little disappointing that there's no clean OP/ED, but I guess since this is the 'movie' version and not the split episodes it doesn't make as much sense to add them even though the JP release did but still. Good on them for including captions for both disks.

Nice, I've got mine preordered on Amazon.
I don't normally buy movies because I just don't tend to rewatch them but I'm hoping the movies see enough interest to encourage some merch our way.

Did they really stick with that horrible DigiDigi remix? That's unfortunate, I mean the last 30 seconds is at least trying, though I would argue failing but that solid minute of "Digi Digimon" on repeat is embarrassing.
Guess I'm on the side that would have preferred Butterfly.

3 subtitle tracks are included on both Blu-ray and DVD:
Closed Captioning for the English dub
Sign track for the English dub
English subtitles for the Japanese audio

While it's not physically essential for me to have Closed Captioning, I grew up watching tv with it, so I normally use it whenever possible. Having English subtitles AND a CC option for the English dub is awesome news (second only to the bonus 22 minutes of interviews)! Looking forward to getting a copy soon --thanks for the thorough review!

Digimon fangirl (especially of Tamers and Tri) ~ Projects in the works: Sora (Digimon Tri) cosplay, Meicoomon plushie."Koji was right. I didnít know why I was here. But I do now." Happy 15th, Digimon Frontier! April 7, 2002